‘In 2011, Marks and Spencer plc (“M&S”) operated a “break clause” in commercial leases of office premises. Following determination, M&S sought to recover from the landlord advance quarterly rent that it had paid for the period after the successful break. M&S relied, in part, on an implied term claim that post-break rent should be returned to it. The landlord denied the claim and litigation ensued. Morgan J in the High Court gave judgment for M&S on the claim. The Court of Appeal unanimously reversed the judgment. The Supreme Court unanimously dismissed M&S’ appeal and re-stated the principles for the implication of contract terms: Marks and Spencer plc v BNP Paribas Securities Services Trust Co (Jersey) Ltd[2015] UKSC 72, [2015] 3 WLR 1843.’

‘Section 2 of the Apportionment Act 1870 applied to teachers’ contracts of employment, requiring that apportionment of pay be considered as accruing from day to day; but it was an error to construe the provision as though it also contained a principle of equal daily accrual.’

‘Where the court, in confiscation proceedings, found that the benefit of the relevant criminal conduct had been jointly obtained, each defendant was liable for the whole of the amount of the benefit and no apportionment was to be made between the co-defendants. However, to avoid double recovery by the state, where there was finding of joint obtaining, so that the confiscation order in respect of each defendant was made for the value of the whole benefit, the order would contain the condition that it would not to be enforced to the extent that a sum had been recovered by way of satisfaction of another confiscation order made in relation to the same joint benefit.’

‘Where a child who was a party to private law proceedings under the Children Act 1989 had the benefit of public funding in respect of his costs and the court considered that it was necessary to instruct a single joint expert to produce a report to assist the court in determining what was in the best welfare interests of the child, but the other parties had no funding and were unable to pay their share of the expert’s costs, the court could depart from the order that it would otherwise have made, to the greater cost of the publicly funded party, where the failure to adduce the expert’s report would result in a breach of one of the party’s rights under articles 6 or 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the court was not prevented from doing so by section 22(4) of the Access to Justice Act 1999. Where, in the case of a single joint expert, there was no problem over resources, there was no normal rule of equal apportionment of the costs, and that issue of apportionment was to be determined in the exercise of the court’s discretion, taking into account the particular circumstances of the case.’

“It was possible to provide a conforming interpretation of the Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1988 which avoided any unlawful restriction on a taxpayer company’s freedom of establishment, conferred by art 43EC of the EC Treaty, by the introduction of an additional exception to those contained in s 748(1)(a) to (e) and (3) in respect of the apportionment of profits of controlled foreign companies by the additional implication of the words ‘ if [the company] is, in that accounting period, actually established in another member state of the EEA and carries on genuine economic activities there’.”

“A project to examine the complicated rules governing the treatment of trust receipts and outgoings as capital or income and the extent to which trustees who have to distinguish between income and capital should be able to invest on a ‘total return’ basis, with reference particularly to trusts for interests in succession and to charitable trusts with permanent endowment.”